Ephemeral city

Abstract

Ephemeral City explores the rapid rise of cheap print and how it permeated Venetian urban culture in the Renaissance. In contrast to the familiar image of Venice as the tranquil, ordered ‘Serenissima’, it evokes the noisy, shifting, transient life of the city at street-level, and offers the first view of one of the city’s most productive and creative industries from the bottom up. The result is a new and unexpected vision of Renaissance culture, characterised by the fluid mobility and dynamic intermingling of texts, ideas, goods and people. The book follows the flood of cheap print (pamphlets, fliers and broadsheets) that streamed from Venetian presses from the late fifteenth century - the most visible and accessible products of the press, often peddled in the streets and declaimed by public performers. Closely intertwined with oral culture, such texts helped to open up new publics for literature, providing information and entertainment to diverse audiences and transforming the city into an epicentre of vernacular literature and performance. Examining the ways in which the production and dissemination of cheap print infiltrated the Venetian urban environment and changed the course of the city's cultural life, the book also traces how local authorities sought to channel these flows by escalating censorship and control over the course of the sixteenth century.

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